As an architect, Isabel Strauss often wonders about physical space. What is here now, and what came before it? What is still possible? Places tell stories — whether they are historical buildings or vacant lots — and she takes everything into consideration.
Last autumn, in her first semester of teaching at Smith College, the assistant professor’s fiery undergrads ignited her own creative spark — and she went looking for an outlet. The Gropius House, a stark rectangular prism preserved by Historic New England, was in need of a modern, modernist twist: a functional public bathroom that blended in with its flat-roofed main house in the town of Lincoln. (Anything would improve upon their midnight-blue portable toilet, ridiculously conspicuous against the stark white garage at the property’s entrance.)
Building intimacy
In November, the preservation organization put out a request for proposals for a “Bauhaus Bathroom,” designed in the spirit of the school of art founded by Walter Gropius, a German architect who fled the country shortly after the Nazis came to power. In 1937, he moved with his wife and daughter to the United States to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A year later, his home, eventually lauded as a minimalist masterpiece, was erected on a grassy rise a few miles from Walden Pond.
Strauss, who now lives in Northampton, had visited the Gropius House with her architect husband during the pandemic. So she felt an intimacy with the property, a reverence that informed her suggestion that the existing garage maintain its distinct physicality while getting a discreet upgrade. (According to the nonprofit, Historic New England is moving forward with fundraising but does not currently have a timeline for construction.)
When she won the competition, Strauss beat out more than 280 proposals from 40 countries by suggesting that the garage be used as an introduction to the house rather than its own artsy entity. “Something I emphasized a lot in my presentation was that this proposal is meant to defer to what’s already there,” she said, “hoping that when it’s built you could kind of squint your eyes and it might blend into the landscape.”
An architectural reckoning
Through another project close to her heart, she has hoped for the opposite — a clear-eyed view of what was and why. Strauss, who grew up in Chicago, is currently at work on an essay collection about Bronzeville, a neighborhood on the South Side often referred to as the “Black Metropolis.” The book, “After Mecca: Spatial Histories of Bronzeville,” began as a personal and architectural reckoning.
“When I was a child, my family told me that Bronzeville held so much history — that it was designed by famous architects, home to a booming Black middle class, renowned for its jazz and gospel music,” writes Strauss in her essay “Reparative Space as Generative Refuge,” included in Cooper Hewitt’s 2025 publication about “Making Home.”
But when she looked closer, she wondered why there were so many gaps in Bronzeville’s landscape, which was “peppered with vacant lots” or “large stretches of grassy land with no buildings, no people.”
After earning a bachelor of arts from Harvard College, Strauss pursued a master of architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she began her thesis, “The Architecture of Reparations,” digging deep into the damage inflicted upon Bronzeville’s Black community during mid-20th century urban renewal.
“I started with the question, ‘Why is there so much vacant land here next to so much life?'” she explained.
Vacancy and agency
In her 2025 essay, she uncovers the answer: “Forcing African Americans and other ‘ethnic undesirables’ to live under restrictive covenants and then demonizing them for their crowded conditions, these organizations invented and perpetuated the narrative that the slum is created by African Americans …” she writes. “This narrative was used to condemn the land in Bronzeville before turning around and selling it at a bargain price for private gain.”
While Strauss was originally interested in housing-based reparations, she put out a request for proposals for other interpretations, which evolved into her forthcoming book from Northwestern University Press.
Now, with the perspectives of a community developer, a preservationist, an architect, a literature professor and an archivist, she is infusing vacancy with agency.
“Architecture can provide the space for healing,” Strauss said on “The Nexus” podcast, an initiative by her alma mater to learn from African American designers. “Architecture is not going to do the healing on its own. And architecture can facilitate these conversations. And the type of architecture and the way you implement these things matters, and we’ve seen how it can work negatively … So how do we do that in reverse?”
Her meaning-making is a work in progress.
Learn more at isabelstrauss.com. In addition to teaching and writing, Strauss and her husband are looking for design projects in the Valley.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.
